Mercy
by CallMeVPls
Summary: Jo Mercier, known to the world as a well known actress, hits the road and returns home to King's County after the world collapses to the dead to find her family. Only she finds more than she bargained for.


One

The air was as hot and sticky as she remembered. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and let her eyes travel over the convenience store that she went to frequently when she was younger. It didn't look anything like she remembered. The windows were shattered and the place had obviously been ransacked. It made her think of simpler times where the place had been her after school go to for a bottle of lemonade and a pack of Starbursts.

Looking at it and thinking back only made her sad, though, so she averted her eyes and kept on walking down the road.

King's Country was a ghost town, now. She had never expected to come home and see her town gone. It made her heart seize. What if her mom and her sister, Diana were gone too?

Jo shoved that harrowing prediction into the deepest parts of her mind. She had to tackle her problems as they came to her, now. There were too many to address all at once. There were too many to add more onto the list when she didn't even know for sure.

But she was going to find out. That's why she traveled to King's County to begin with. After all the bad shit went down in Baton Rouge and she saw her personal assistant tear into the show's screenwriter, Jo had hit the road, worried about her family.

She had never seen anything like it before, but Jo had been in enough movies to know that it was only going to be downhill from there.

She hadn't been home in ages, either. Diana and her mom always came down to L.A. to visit her, rather than vice versa. It wasn't that she didn't like King's County, but she began to think of it as a place of her past. She had been onto other things and yeah, she had planned to make her big return at some point, but she never thought it would turn it the way it did.

Who knew it would take the dead coming back to life for Jo Mercier to return to King's County after making it big in Hollywood? That thought made her laugh, stupidly. Maybe it was hysteria from lack of food and water. It had been two days since she ate and she drank the last of her water this morning.

She hoped that she found her family, but a few supplies would be great too. She couldn't go on much longer without, not with her head pounding from lack of water and essential nutrients.

When she came upon the road where her mother's house had been, she inhaled deeply before continuing down toward the house, finally pondering what she would find when she got there. Best case scenario, they were both there, shaken, but unscathed. Worse case scenario, she found them dead, their corpses roaming around looking for more to join them.

She hated that her mind went such dark places, but she was trying to prepare herself for what she was going to walk into.

She dredged up the stairs and onto the porch, almost routinely. Jo stopped at the door and her hand hovered over the door handle, her heart beating wildly at the prospect of what she was going to find once she opened this door.

She could walk away now and never know. Maybe that would be easier than learning a terrible truth… Jo shook her head at the thought and sighed, gripping the handle of the door and quietly pushing it open.

The home opened up to her and offered a quiet and empty hallway. A couple of pairs of shoes were strewn across the floor, along the wall, making everything look quite normal. Jo knew better and took out the gun she had found in an abandoned car's dash somewhere outside Georgia.

She tapped the gun's base on the threshold and waited, holding her breath. A second passes and then another. Jo tapped again.

Nothing.

She exhales and takes a step into the house. "You got this." she muttered to herself, encouraging herself to keep moving.

"Ma?" the movie star called out into the seemingly empty home. "Di?"

The noise took her by surprise when she heard it. A scuffle and a loud crash. Jo took it as her cue to dash up the stairs in search of it's source. Too anxious to care about her own safety, at the moment, she swung the door of her sister's bedroom open.

The room was trashed. Clothes were thrown all over, the mirror was broken, the bed stripped, momentos throw and broken all over, and in the corner, on the floor, in a heap was her baby sister, sobbing.

"Diana?" Jo croaked, her throat made tight by the scene before her.

Her little sister's brown haired head snapped up, fast. The tears still pooling in her grey green eyes made her eyes look glossy and wide. "You're here." she cried, jumping up and tackling her sister in a tight and long overdue hug. "You're here." she said again, crying into her shoulder. "You made it."

Jo hugged her sister back, closing her eyes and thanking whatever powers kept her sister alive. After a minute, she opened her eyes and looked around the room, wondering why it was the way it was.

Her sister was a neat freak and a perfectionist. For as long as Jo could remember, Diana had always had this incessant need to keep everything neat and in order. "Di," she started, pulling herself out of her sister's tight embrace. "What happened here? Where's Ma?"

Diana's quiet crying turned into full on sobbing again. Jo's heart already knew the answer. Her voice broke. "How?" she then asked. Her sister didn't reply right away, so Jo grabbed her arms and made Diana look her in her eyes. "I have to know."

The teenager sniffed, and wiped at her face. "One got ahold of me." she told her, hollowly. "She got it off, but by then, another was close enough to tear into her arm. She told me to run because more were coming. I just left her there."

Her sister was crying again and by the looks of it, she had been crying for a while now. Jo absorbed the information, using all of her best acting skills to reign in her emotions. She couldn't break down in front of Diana. Not in the state she was in. Jo knew this was the moment for her to be strong for Diana.

"I'm here." she murmured, pulling her close again, holding her own tears back. "You're not alone, anymore."


End file.
